Confabulation is a wonderful psychological term to describe the confusion of imagination with memory. But.Dr XX...... used it to mean something altogether more sinister - the way in which invented traditions may be used to construct a false identity.

Actually, I suspect it's universal among humans."The term confabulation is a label for our subjective experience of degrees of cognitive dissonance between what we think we know and what someone else thinks they know."

The more dissonance, the more we call it confabulation. Why do witnesses at the same event tell different stories?As for Dr XX - ALL TRADITIONS ARE INVENTED, they don't crawl out of the bog and latch on to the nearest host - do they...???

A more relevant distinction between traditions is not whether or not they are invented, but whether they are any good or a bag of sh*te. And that, as we all know, is also subjective.

Blast.....I'd temporarily forgotten you had a background in these areas, Matt. Confabulation isn't a word I've come across very often, and it seemed an interesting comment to while way a tedious moment or two.

Thanks Julia, but I suspect you have confabulated my background even more than I have! Or differently, anyway. And I was genuinely intrigued by the questions you raised. I am fascinated by the categories of fact, fantasy, truth, lies, fiction, myth, and relationships between them. For example, does it resonate if I suggest that a fact is less than alive, and a truth is more than alive? And perhaps a myth is close to 'living'?

I composed a reply but took too long to do so, became logged out, then lost the lot when I attempted to log back in. Probably just as well, but, in short..... we know who the culprits are in the piping world. When I log into Facebook I'm told that one culprit and I have 100 mutual friends, which is an indication of just how gullible my other 'friends' are.

If Joe Bloggs writes a tune, or variations on an old one, I might try to write it in 12-tone style, or a more traditional idiom.Preferring the latter, he does so, releases it into the wild and sees what happens.

Not being memorable himself, the tune gets classified as 'anonymous' - if it is still current in (say) 100 years, then it is called 'traditional'.By then, Joe Bloggs is past caring.

You wouldn't agree that some traditions are emergent rather than invented Matt? Invented referring to the tartanry/kilt/Ossian/Sobieski-Stewarts manner of conscious production (as Trevor-Roper talks about in the Hobsbawm book).

Ben Power wrote:You wouldn't agree that some traditions are emergent rather than invented Matt?

Hi Ben, it depends what you mean by 'emergent'. From what, where or whom do they emerge? Is the tradition itself the active element, rather than an artifact? I wrote that all traditions are invented, which seemed self-evident when I wrote it (is it?) - does 'emergent' mean they may invent themselves?

Ben Power wrote:Invented referring to the tartanry/kilt/Ossian/Sobieski-Stewarts manner of conscious production (as Trevor-Roper talks about in the Hobsbawm book).